Baghdad, Iraq – Panicked by rumors of a suicide bomber, thousands of Shiite pilgrims stampeded on a bridge during a religious procession Wednesday morning, crushing one another or plunging 30 feet into the muddy Tigris River. About 950 died, mostly women and children, officials said.
Hundreds of lost sandals littered the two-lane bridge, a railing of which toppled after the panicking crowd broke through.
The tragedy was the single biggest loss of life in Iraq since the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
“We heard that a suicide attacker was among the crowd,” said Fadhel Ali, 28, barefoot and soaking wet on the riverbank.
“Everybody was yelling, so I jumped from the bridge into the river, swam and reached the bank. I saw women, children and old men falling after me into the water.”
The crowd was on edge because of the 110-degree heat, a mortar barrage near the Shiite shrine where they were headed and the ever-present fear of suicide bombers, etched into memories after repeated attacks against large religious gatherings. Seven people died in the mortar barrage three hours before the stampede, the U.S. military said.
Police later said they found no explosives at the bridge – either on any individual or in any cars parked nearby. Instead, poor crowd control and the climate of fear in Iraq after years of bullets, bombs and bloodshed appeared largely to have caused the horrific carnage.
Marchers jammed up at a checkpoint at the western edge of the Imams bridge, which has been closed to civilians for months to prevent movement by extremists between the Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah and the Sunni district of Azamiyah across the river.
“This tragedy was the direct result of terrorism; hundreds of innocent people, mostly women and children, have died because of the fear and panic that terrorists are sowing in Iraq,” NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said.
Defense Minister Saadoun al- Dulaimi, a Sunni, said three suicide bombers were stopped Wednesday some distance from the shrine but “blew themselves up before reaching their destination.”
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in Washington that he was not aware of any evidence that the stampede on the bridge was caused by a suicide bombing.
Others blamed the government and the U.S.-trained security forces.
“Early security measures should have been taken to protect the lives of citizens and organize their processions,” Iraqi Communist Party leader Hameed Majid Mousa told al- Arabiya television. “We all know that there are terrorists who lie in wait for such events and prepare to ambush the people.”
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, told state-run Iraqiya television that “the government should take measures for an honest investigation to determine how failures doubled the casualties.”
The marchers were commemorating the death in the year 799 of Imam Moussa ibn Jaafar al-Kadhim, one of the 12 principal Shiite saints, who is buried in a mosque in the northern Baghdad neighborhood of Kazimiyah.
Since the 2003 ouster of Sad dam Hussein, a Sunni, Shiite political parties have encouraged huge turnouts at religious festivals to display the majority sect’s power in the new Iraq.
Sunni religious extremists have often targeted the gatherings to foment sectarian war, but that has not stopped the Shiites.
The ceremonies have often been chaotic, with huge crowds overtaxing the ability of police and security services to protect them. Television reports said about 1 million pilgrims from Baghdad and outlying provinces had gathered near the shrine Wednesday.
“Pushing started when a rumor was spread by a terrorist who claimed that there was a person with an explosive belt, which caused panic,” Interior Minister Bayn Jabr said. “Some fell from the bridge, others fell on the barricades” and were trampled to death.
No official offered any evidence that Sunni insurgents were directly responsible for spreading the rumor.
Scores of bodies covered with white sheets lay on the sidewalk outside one hospital under the broiling sun because the morgue was packed. Many of them were women in black gowns, as well as children and old men. Tearful relatives wandered among the dead, lifting the sheets trying to find loved ones. When they did, they would shriek, pound their chests or fall to the ground, sobbing.
The head of the country’s major Sunni clerical group, the Association of Muslim Scholars, told al-Jazeera television that Wednesday’s disaster was “another catastrophe and something else that could be added to the list of ongoing Iraqi tragedies.”
